The Gift of an Open Heart

Leza Lowitz finds in life’s difficulties the greatest gift of all.

October 2002

I can barely hear the voice of the newscaster over the whistle of the teakettle. It’s all white noise until a name jumps out from the chatter. Phil Stein, a prominent psychologist, has been murdered—stabbed by his wife—in the poolhouse of his multimillion- dollar home near San Francisco. I place one hand on the back of a chair and sit down at the kitchen table, fingers trembling around my teacup. Phil was the father of the boyfriend I had in high school, and I recall him telling us how as a young boy in Austria, he’d come face to face with “pure evil.” He’d dug deep holes in the earth and hid for days, shivering and shitting on himself as the Nazis routed out the Jews in his city. Throughout high school, my boyfriend and I modeled for Phil’s role-playing classes; we played a couple in conflict to teach people nonviolent communication. During that time, Phil had apparently been sleeping with his teenaged patient, just a few years older than us, and he eventually married her. Now this.

I turn off the TV and try to go about my day, taking my son to school and managing affairs at my yoga studio. I try to focus on these tasks at hand, but I keep thinking about where I grew up. I’m hunching over, as if protecting myself, even though I’m watching the drama unfold from Japan.

People sometimes ask me why my husband and I left Berkeley, one of the most unconstricting places on the planet, to live in Tokyo, one of the most rigid. I often ask myself the same thing. California is worlds away from Japan, yet somehow Berkeley is still in me, beating like the telltale heart under the battered floorboards of my psyche. I know this because even though I have been doing yoga for years, my shoulders are hard as rocks.

I go for my weekly massage.

“What are you protecting yourself from?” the massage therapist asks.

“When I was younger, I experienced a lot of violence,” I say, wanting to avoid telling my story, because it’s just a story. Over the years I grew tired of claiming victimhood. I survived, and certainly people have dealt with far worse. Moreover, these days I try not to think about violence. I’m a yoga teacher, after all.

And yet, my past makes me who I am, so how can I not carry it? My teacher says the seeds of violence come from the anger within ourselves. If I want to find peace, he suggests, I have to uproot the violent seeds in my heart, which means I have to dig them up and give them a proper burial in another soil. Truthfully, I don’t have to go very far to look for violence, even in Japan, one of the safest countries in the world. The violence here isn’t random. It’s purposeful. Perhaps that makes it worse.

Not too long ago in Japan, the wife of a family friend was stabbed to death by a gangster dressed as a delivery man bearing orchids. The vendetta was against the husband, an accountant who’d done work for the mob but hadn’t cooked the books well enough. Killing him would have been too quick a punishment, so they killed her and let him bury himself under the weight of his own remorse.

So why do I live here?

Tokyo isn’t the city of my dreams. It’s big, polluted, and crowded. Though the people are kind, many men are imprisoned in their dark suits, many women are handcuffed to their Louis Vuitton. It’s practically a police state, though the police carry no guns. If you want to hurt someone here, you do it with a knife or a sword. Murder is more difficult this way, and that’s a good thing. But on the other hand, there are angry cries from the earth, like quakes followed by massive tsunamis. We can say these things are acts of nature, but isn’t there a connection between human nature and nature? Or have we moved so far away from that connection that we no longer even fathom it? What about the incredible hubris of building nuclear power plants on active fault lines? What about karma and responsibility?

The truth is, I live here because living here forces me to grow and ask tough questions of myself that I wouldn’t have to ask in America. Questions like, why do I stay?

For a while, I think it’s enough to teach and practice tonglen, a Tibetan meditation practice, which develops and expands loving-kindness. But then the weight on my shoulders gets too much to bear. I go to another healer who reaches in for my heart like a shaman and throws it at my feet.

“It’s time to deal with the pain,” he says. “You keep waiting for it all to magically go away, but it’s not.”

I stare down at my heart, covered in armor. It’s time to take the armor off, the only way I know how.

Starting with words.

San Francisco 1962

I was born in San Francisco, with the beautiful ocean sparkling in the distance. We lived in an old Victorian near the Presidio. One night when we were out to dinner, our house was set on fire.

The basement playroom—where I’d held seances with the neighborhood girls—burnt completely, as did the entire first floor. If the family of eight next door hadn’t hauled buckets of water up and down the stairs, the entire three-story house would’ve collapsed.

“Did anyone have reason to dislike you?” the fire chief asked, “Anyone with a grudge?”

“No, not that I can think of,” my mother replied.

“Is it because we’re Jewish?” I said, echoing what I’d often heard her say.

She shot me a look. The chief, with his big, red hat, gazed down at me. “I doubt that, miss,” he said.

My father rushed home from work. Together, we surveyed the blackened wreck.

“What on earth are we going to do now?” my mother said, picking her way through the charred, soggy things.

My father assured us we’d be safe and sound. But the United States was at war and my father was in the navy. Soon we were living under a corrugated metal roof at a naval base in Key West.

Key West 1968

The southernmost tip of the United States was a place full of distant lights and windswept stories, intimations of injustice (class, racial, religious), and the ghosts of literary heroes like Tennessee Williams and Ernest Hemingway looming somewhere unseen in the sultry Florida skies.

My father was a navy psychiatrist whose job was to determine who was sane enough to fight. Young men would call him up on their way to the roofs of buildings, threatening suicide. Calling their bluff, he would tell them to “tough it out.” Sometimes they didn’t.

With my Labrador retriever in tow, I chased the marines as they jogged down the beach, and sometimes they cried at the sight of us. I wondered who they saw when they looked at me. A little sister, an unborn child?

There was only one school in Key West, and it was Lutheran. Being Jewish got me out of having to pray with the other kids, but I used to talk during prayer time. I was often punished for this, made to press my nose against the desk during class. In the silence I dreamed up stories, imagined all the places I’d go when I got old enough. I didn’t believe in God, though I called to him during hurricanes or when my parents fought.

When my father’s duty ended, we loaded up an old Mercedes and drove back to California—truly land’s end, where you either fell into the water or spent the rest of your life tipped at the edge of the shore.

Berkeley 1971

Berkeley was named after an Irish bishop whose philosophy advocated, in part, a denial of the reality of the material world. It was a fitting namesake for a place of rebellion and anarchy that prided itself on being out of sync with the rest of the continent.

Many of the city’s streets were named after great and noble men—American naturalist John Muir, British philosopher John Stuart Mill, the Greek mathematician Euclid. White men, that is. I realized this on the bus, traveling from the hills, where the rambling, fenced homes were nestled in the open hillside, to the flat- lands, where the single-story, paint-peeled houses had metal bars across their windows and were crunched together like the curled fingers of a fist.

I attended the utopian educational experiment called Malcolm X Elementary. The school had originally been Lincoln Elementary, but the students staged a revolution. Lincoln had led the war that freed the slaves, but he was criticized for having an ambiguous and—by modern standards—sometimes racist view of African Americans. We saw the incongruity of the person versus the hero that history had made of him, and there was no room in our ten-year-old minds for what we saw as hypocrisy. Lincoln was out.

So who was in?

A hero like Malcolm. Maybe because he’d died young, or maybe because he’d come up from the twin hells of the street and prison to become a prophet of the people. Or maybe just because it was Berkeley and everyone was walking around with the black power fist salute, talking about revolution. Even us.

Heroes came to our school auditorium to inspire us. James Baldwin, with his intense voice choking like an ailing carburetor, told us to live together but not give in to each other. Tall, exotic Angela Davis—a woman accused of aiding a murder— was wrapped in the power of her convictions. Maya Angelou, the colors of earth—reds, browns, sunsets—radiated like a dashiki from her poetry, beautiful and strong.

For a while, I was in heaven.

Then I learned that who you thought you were was not necessarily how others saw you, and sometimes there was nowhere to hide.

Letters to Richard T. Johnson, 1973

We were supposed to write a report on someone we admired. I couldn’t think of anyone. My mom had a necklace that said, “War is Not Healthy For Children and Other Living Things,” with the name Richard T. Johnson on the back. From Knoxville, Tennessee, he was nineteen when drafted to Vietnam. He’d been a football wide receiver in high school and he’d wanted to be an engineer. He was last seen near Qui Nhon in South Vietnam. His body was never found.

“He’s not a hero,” the school bully Rufus glowered. “No one’s ever even heard of him.”

It was true. No one really knew about him except for me. And his family, of course. And the people who made the necklace.
Mrs. Sterling walked up to my desk and put her hand on my shoulders. Her hand was firm and strong. “It’s okay,” she said.
I thought that when I finished my report, I’d forget about Richard T. Johnson. But I didn’t, because Rufus kicked my ass over Richard after class. I was beaten up often after that.

Ganged up on at school, attacked while jogging, walking home, or just minding my own business.

Once, five older girls walked toward me. I should have seen them coming, but I didn’t. Soon they were on me, knocking the books out of my hands. One punched me in the stomach. Another spat in my face.

“Give us your fucking money!”

I scrambled to pick up my books from the ground.

“What the hell are you doing? We want the money, bitch!” The biggest girl, with thick, white bra straps poking out at each shoulder, kicked me in the legs. A smaller girl snatched my pack, took out the wrinkled dollar bills from my wallet, and threw it back at me.

I went to pick up the wallet. This was a mistake.

“Show me your hand,” the big girl said.

I pulled my hand away; she pulled it toward her. But she couldn’t get the turquoise ring off my finger. My grandmother had given me the ring before she died.

“Bite the fucking finger!” said the smaller girl.

I pulled my hand away, got the ring off and handed it over. Then they ran off down the street, laughing.

I didn’t want to tell my father what happened, so I lied to him about where my money had gone.

“You think money grows on trees?” he asked. “Is that what you think?”

“No, I—”

“Don’t talk back to me, young lady.” He started to raise his hand.

“Please, no,” I said, covering my face and spinning around.

“Don’t turn your back when I’m speaking to you!”

“I’m sorry,” I said, turning back around. And then I did it. “Asshole,” I said under my breath. I had never, ever talked back like this before.

“What did you call me?” he bellowed. With one hand around the back of my neck, he ground bitter, chalky, gritty Lava soap into my mouth, trying to force my lips open.

I twisted out of his grasp and ran up the stairs. He ran up after me, grabbed me by the arm and hauled me over his knee on the stairwell. He took off his belt.

“Apologize,” he shouted. But I didn’t. Couldn’t. The truth was, I wasn’t sorry.

“It hurts me as much as it hurts you,” he said, whipping me hard with the brass buckle.

“Tell it to the judge,” I managed to say. I don’t even know where that line came from. I must have heard it on TV.

Later that night, my mother came into my room.

“I told your father I was unhappy. I told him I wanted a divorce.”

“A divorce?” I gulped. Was that why he’d gone ballistic?

“You know what he said?” she asked, shaking her head. “‘Jews don’t divorce, they endure. But I can’t endure any longer. Here’s the thing,” Mom said, “if you suggest something’s wrong with a shrink, they deny it. Then they say you’re hostile and that you should work on your anger.”

I nodded. Maybe dealing with all those “crazies” made him crazy too.

“I’m so sorry, honey. I need you to understand.” “Understand?” There was so much I didn’t understand.

“I met him when I was just a bit older than you are now. I was sixteen. I’ve changed so much. He’s changed. The world has changed.”

“Yeah, I noticed.”

“I want to go far away from here. I already feel so far away,” she confessed.

“Don’t go,” I said, although I knew how she felt, because I felt the same way. All I could do was hug her, hoping with all my heart that when she left, she’d take me with her.

Beginner’s Mind, 1978

The year my parents divorced, the happy face was everywhere. I loathed that yellow-and-black pop-art countenance plastered on T-shirts and pillowcases. Everything reduced to one smooth upward arc. Smile. Have a Nice Day.

Fuck that, I thought. I wanted things with imperfections, scars, dents, and frowns. I wanted things that had been banged up, things that broke down without a warranty. Things like me. I started taking drugs, hanging out with Vietnam vets, flunking out of school. I was angry and I liked it.

Then one day I met Zev Stein at Berkeley High. He’d also been beaten up, and his father was a shrink. He wasn’t daunted by my cynicism. He saw right through it.

“If I hadn’t been beaten up, I would never have realized how important it is to stand up for who you are,” he said.

“I guess you’re right. But I have no idea who I am or what I could possibly stand up for,” I replied.

He showed me death poems by Zen monks. He gave me a copy of Shunryu Suzuki’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, with its famous phrase: “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.”

He brought me to Mr. Powers, a social science teacher who taught us how to meditate at our desk chairs. My mind was bombarded with thoughts, desires, criticism.

“It’s bullshit,” I said, opening my eyes. “It doesn’t work.”

“It’s all about practice. You just do it every day, like brushing your teeth,” Zev countered calmly. “And it works.”

The next time, I couldn’t stop sobbing.

“Maybe I should go into therapy after all,” I said.

Mr. Powers laughed. “Just keep sitting—be in your breath, get out of your head.”

“Do you mean I need to be more detached?” I asked. I’d read Zev’s books. I wanted to be a good student.

“No. The point is not detachment. It’s nonattachment,” he replied. “Just stop thinking so much and start feeling. Get into your heart.”

“I don’t know how.”

“I’ll teach you if you’ll let me,” Zev said.

When I sat down to meditate, the story of my life surfaced; all the people who’d wronged me. Yet, when I was done, I felt peaceful. Zev and Mr. Powers made me think it was possible to be happy, no matter what the world threw at you.

“I’ll let you,” I finally said. What did I have to lose?

A lot, it turned out. After someone tried to rape me, I decided to take karate. Our teacher made us meditate and chant the Heart Sutra.

And I kept Mr. Powers’ words in my head for years, each time I sat down to meditate. Even after I repeatedly had the shit kicked out of me. Even after Zev’s father was murdered and the killer tsunami came crashing down.

Tokyo 2011

Karate eventually brought me to Japan. Here, I’m often invisible. People don’t sit next to me on the trains. Shopkeepers sometimes talk about me to my Japanese friends, as if I’m not there.

I open a yoga studio. I tell my story to my students. Hearing myself, I think, maybe I got the story wrong. Maybe there’s another narrative. I practice naikan, gratitude, thinking of all the teachers, friends, family members, editors, and bosses who’ve supported me. I start wondering if all the people who’ve “wronged” me have actually been my teachers, starting with my parents. My father asks for forgiveness. I give it and ask for the same. I consider that all the wrongs have made me more aware of suffering. I want to understand how the events of my past are my own creations. I want to own them, to set them free. I realize that in Japan I’m a minority, and I can feel what it’s like to live that way.

Because, let’s face it: I’m a healthy, white, upper middle class, Jewish American girl, with everything afforded me by those labels. So I got the shit kicked out of me. So I learned that life wasn’t always peaceful or safe. So I awoke to the realities of the world. So what? That world busted my heart right open and that was the best gift I’ve ever gotten.

And then the earthquake and tsunami hit. And I’m more afraid than I’ve ever been before. It’s as if the universe shouted, “Fear? I’ll show you fear.”

The quake forces me to see the part of me that’s trying to be invisible, separate from others, hiding in some dark corner to protect myself. But I can’t protect myself from an earthquake. I have to surrender to it. All of it.

Because when the earth shakes, a woman next to me screams and, as I reach out to comfort her, I know I’m comforting myself at the same time. In the darkest moment when my world seems like it might end, I’m untying the chains of my tethered heart and setting it free.

Editor’s note: Some of the names in this article have been changed.